Our hospitals are capable of doing much better

When Dr Ouma Oluga, Secretary General of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Union threatened a nationwide doctors’ strike last year, no one was prepared for the suffering that followed. The Government, apparently, had reneged on a signed Comprehensive Bargaining Agreement signed in 2013 and needed a little electric shock treatment to get it out of its lethargic stupor.

Dr Oluga’s ‘mother’ of all strikes, sadly, is stained with the blood of those who died crying for help at hospital gates, by the roadside and in hospital wards where stethoscopes and white jackets had become a rarity. But despite the ignominy of the strike, one of the demands by doctors was an enabling work environment.